Thursday, June 14, 2007

Don Herbert, aka Mister Wizard, died this week. He made me like science even more than I already liked it. I even had a favorite experiment that he did, too. He wanted to show the kind of chemical reactions that you got with bases (as opposed to acids). So, he sprayed a bunch of oven cleaner on to some aluminum foil, folded it up and waited. A few minutes later it started to smoke as the base in the oven cleaner ate through the foil. He only had to say two sentences to make me try it as an experiment at school:

"Don't get too close! It creates toxic fumes."

That's as good as saying "free money!" to a boy in sixth grade.

Eventually, though, I found that I liked history and politics more than I liked chemistry, thus the History degree. Still, though, Mister Wizard kept that sense of wonder about science alive.